Donald Trump Announces Plan to Outsource ISIS Strategy

Despite his populist protestations over outsourcing, Donald Trump hasn’t always been such a good friend to the ordinary American worker. The billionaire real-estate mogul has manufactured much of his merchandise overseas, allegedly hired undocumented foreign workers to construct Trump Tower, and even reportedly offered to export the job of being president to potential running mate John Kasich. (Kasich declined.) So it’s little surprise that the Republican presidential nominee also wants to outsource the responsibility of “defeating ISIS” to people other than himself.

Throughout his campaign, Trump has boasted about having a secret plan to fight ISIS. What reasonable person, he reasoned, would let his enemy know his intention by sharing it with voters? On Tuesday, however, Trump offered a glimpse of his grand strategy. “We’re going to convene my top generals and give them a simple instruction: they will have 30 days to submit to the Oval Office a plan for soundly and quickly defeating ISIS,” he proclaimed during a rally in North Carolina.

Was this the “foolproof” plan he teased in 2015 to Greta Van Susteren, though he refused to share it at the time? “If I run, and if I win, I don’t want the enemy to know what I’m doing,” Trump said, while claiming that it would be a “100 percent” successful plan to defeat ISIS “very quickly.”

The crux of Trump’s plan, then, is trust. “I don’t want to be [Barack] Obama, where he goes on television to explain exactly when we’re going to attack a certain city, what we’re going to do, what hour we’re going to be using for the attack, how many men are going in. I don’t want to do that.”

What better way to conceal Trump’s mind from his enemies than by having someone else do the thinking? No wonder 88 retired military leaders recently endorsed the G.O.P. nominee—he’s offering the military carte blanche to determine U.S. policy on his behalf.